MAGA’s driving force is Christian nationalism

By Francis Wilkinson

President Donald Trump, we are told, is endorsed by God.

“Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, You, and You alone, saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by Your mighty hand,” said the Reverend Franklin Graham during his invocation at Trump’s inauguration last week. “Mr. President,” Graham addressed Trump, “the last four years, there are times, I’m sure, you thought, it was pretty dark. But look what God has done.”

Graham’s MAGA God might be unrecognisable to tens of millions of Americans, but a new poll released today by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute shows that two thirds (67 per cent) of Christian nationalists either completely or mostly agree that God ordained Trump to be the winner of the 2024 election.

In a survey of more than 22,000 adults, PRRI found that Christian nationalism is deeply embedded in the GOP, with a majority of Republicans qualifying as either Christian nationalist adherents (20 per cent) or sympathisers (33 per cent). That means they agreed with statements provided by PRRI such as, “being Christian is an important part of being truly American,” “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society,” and “if the US moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.” The more Christian nationalists reside in a state, the greater the share of Trump voters.

Christian nationalists insist that the US was founded as a Christian conservative nation (as 21st century far-right White Christians understand those terms) and should be ruled by contemporary White Christian conservative values.

“Because of the prominence of race in US history — particularly whiteness as a category of power — race and ethnicity have always functioned as powerful cultural lenses in the US, refracting even shared religious beliefs in different political directions,” said PRRI President Robert Jones, via email. “Among African Americans, affirming Christian nationalist attitudes does not strongly translate into the political impulse for the trademark features of the MAGA movement, such as cultural dominance and racial hierarchy. Among Hispanic Christians, Catholics are far less likely than Protestants to support Christian nationalism. Among Hispanic Protestants, however, who are mostly evangelical and much more theologically and politically connected to white evangelicalism, the political patterns look much closer to the patterns among white Christians.”

Like Trump, White Christian nationalists had a visceral reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama, a seemingly impossible political eventuality that somehow came to pass. Over the course of Obama’s presidency, the White Christian population in the US fell below 50 per cent for the first time, threatening to entrench a multiracial pluralism that would leave White Christian conservatives as just one bloc among many, with the demographic tide rendering them less dominant with each succeeding year.

In PRRI’s poll, 68 per cent agreed that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” and 69 per cent agreed with Trump’s Nazi-infused rhetoric that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

They are also among Trump’s most fanatical supporters. Christian nationalists were prominent among the violent mob that attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, mounting crosses along with a gallows. Proud Boys stopped and prayed before their assault, asking God to restore their “value systems” and seeking heavenly sanction for their impending attack on the seat of democracy. Some Christian nationalists think a bit of vigilantism may be necessary to secure godliness; nearly 4 in 10 agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may need to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

In return for such passion, Trump has delivered political goods. He pardoned all of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, including those who assaulted police. He installed a former Fox News host with Christian nationalist tattoos as the leader of the Department of Defense. Trump nominated Russell Vought, who said Republicans should focus less on religious liberty and more on “ Christian nation-ism ,” as the head of the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget.

Many Christian nationalists, having given up on experts and science, welcome Trump’s anti-science agenda, including his nomination of the conspiracy-monger Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the nation’s health services. “Drill, baby, drill” is a siren song for those who believe that God created Earth solely for man to exploit. Even Trump’s attacks on transgender Americans are part of the emotional spoils system — they are a favorite target of Christian nationalist groups that insist that trans people are unreal.

You can plot the ascent of Christian nationalism in Reverend Graham’s partisan prayer. Graham also gave an invocation at Trump’s first inaugural, in 2017. White Christian conservatives had overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016, but they were still acclimating themselves to Trump’s personal corruption and public shows of aggression. Graham’s more cautious, colorless, 2017 invocation reflected their uncertainty. He implied that God was on Trump’s side, but his remarks could have been delivered by his more conventionally conservative father, the Reverend Billy Graham, who had prayed at the inauguration of Democratic President Bill Clinton, among others. By January 2025, however, pumped up on White Christian chauvinism, Franklin Graham could dispense with any pretense that he spoke for, or to, a diverse nation.

As Katherine Stewart, an author of books on Christian nationalism, writes, “For the Christian nationalist leaders whose movement brought Trump to power, the fundamental model of government is ‘kingship.’ Many of them describe Trump as a new King Cyrus and insist that God chose him to ‘save’ America.”

Kings, of course, have little use for constitutions or laws that constrain their divinely sanctioned power. An explicit prohibition on establishing state religion is written into the Constitution. The author of the Declaration of Independence literally dissected a Bible with a razor to eliminate parts — the majority, as it happened — that he found wanting. But constitutional and historical quibbles are no match for the resentments and insecurities cultivated by Trump and Fox News, or the reflected glory that shines on Christian nationalists from an invented past.

The PRRI poll also shows that 72 per cent of Christian nationalists believe American society “has become too soft and feminine.” In January, when a female episcopal bishop asked Trump to show mercy toward the vulnerable, the MAGA-industrial complex attacked her for the sin of compassion.

Muscular exertions of Christianity and cultural insecurity seem to go hand in hand. The turn of the 19th century was another era of high masculine anxiety, when men were leaving the open fields for hemmed-in factories and cramped offices, and women clamored for the power to vote. In the early 20th century, evangelist Billy Sunday pleaded with the Lord to save America “from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, ossified, three-carat Christianity.”

Ultimately, Christian nationalists must maintain a dual identity: They are at once a White tribe chosen by God to rule and an oppressed minority that suffers an affliction of feminists, libs and racial minorities. “The last administration was not friendly at all to people of faith,” Graham said in a post-inaugural interview , speaking of the church-going Catholic Joe Biden.

Yet Graham and his flock are free at last. Since Trump’s first term, Christian nationalism has grown more prominent throughout the Republican Party and more assertive in claiming its divinely sanctioned power. GOP officials in Oklahoma are demanding that the Bible be inserted into public school curricula while GOP officials in Florida insist that Black history be taken out. White Christian nationalists are in GOP leadership positions throughout Congress, and have a steadfast ally in the speaker of the House, who validates their grievances and echoes their propaganda.

In his inaugural speech, his left hand at a curious remove from the nearest Bible, Trump the Redeemer assured White Christian extremists that their faith in a vengeful God, eager to deploy authoritarian aggression, was not misplaced. “My life was saved for a reason,” Trump said. “I was saved by God to make America great again.” In this telling, God allowed the assassinations of Lincoln, Kennedy and King. He delivered His only Son to crucifixion. But He drew the line at Donald Trump’s ear.

The moral and logical absurdities of Christian nationalism are not weaknesses; they sustain it, enabling it to excuse any crime , or accommodate any falsehood , in the drive to remake America. “ Christian nationalism uses Christianity as a means to an end,” the Southern Baptist intellectual Russell Moore has said, “that end being some form of authoritarianism.”

Moore was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission until 2021, when he resigned. In a 2020 letter that he wrote to ERLC’s Board of Trustees, he explained how rising extremism had made his role ever more difficult:

“My family and I have faced constant threats from white nationalists and white supremacists, including within our convention,” Moore wrote. “Some of them have been involved in neo-Confederate activities going back for years. Some are involved with groups funded by white nationalist nativist organisations. Some of them have just expressed raw racist sentiment, behind closed doors.”

In Christianity Today, the Protestant publication that he edits, Moore writes: “Christian nationalists seek solidarity not in the actual mitigating of human suffering but in the mostly symbolic boundary markers of taking the right amount of theatrical umbrage at culture war outrages, at having the right kind of enemies, at ‘owning the libs.’”

By wrapping MAGA in the symbols of Christianity, Christian nationalists have attempted to cover Trump’s gangsterism with a veneer of godliness. Few seem fooled. The number of unchurched Americans has risen in tandem with the ascendance of Trump, and Christian nationalism, to power. Hypocrisy and malice may repel more Americans than they attract. But if the GOP’s authoritarian assault succeeds, the movement’s popularity won’t much matter. Christian nationalists will hold power, and exercise it, whether the American majority likes it or not.